


Looking For Yourself Out There

by knittedace



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Chaotic Evil becoming Chaotic Neutral, Epic Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Identity Issues, Jo Grant Needs More Love, Loss of Identity, Missy Does What She Wants, Names, Overthinking things, Vignette, explaining things, finding yourself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-13 20:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11768181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knittedace/pseuds/knittedace
Summary: Since death is for other people, Missy regenerates.She faces a long journey to find the Doctor again, and an even longer one to find herself.





	Looking For Yourself Out There

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Drops of Jupiter_ by Train. I'm falling back into this fandom and into the beautiful, infuriating, perfect relationship between these two characters. Send help.
> 
> I struggled to phrase the warnings in a way that wasn’t spoilery, so please jump to the A/N at the end for warnings.

Missy died where she fell, alone.

*

She woke up just in time to see the last tendrils of regeneration energy dissolve into the cloudless sky. She stared up at it. What planet was she on - no, not a planet at all, a ship. A ship full of Cybermen, and the Doctor, and her younger self - and with that, she remembered what had killed her.

She sat up, staring at her hands, still holding the knife she’d stabbed him with. Typical. So many years spent in the Vault, caught between so-called good and evil, between past and possible future, and then when she’d finally chosen which side to stand on - she died. Something hysterical bubbled up in her chest, out of her lips. She’d died laughing, too; at least there was some sort of symmetry, she supposed.

Her laughter echoed across the fields. There was no one alive left to hear it.

*

The Doctor was gone.

She was furious for all of five minutes before she remembered that he still believed she’d left with her younger self. And of course two versions of the Master could take care of themselves, even surrounded by Cybermen - the Doctor’s mind wasn’t twisted enough to think of the danger they were to _each other_. She supposed she couldn’t entirely blame him for leaving. Instead, she decided to be angry that she’d done the right thing for once, had died for him, and he didn’t even _know_ about it.

She hacked into the station’s camera footage to catch up on what had happened, then copied the recording of her own death. She didn’t have a plan, but she knew one thing for certain: one day she would see the Doctor again, and she would make sure he saw what she’d done.

*

The thing about regeneration was this:

It was unpredictable, but not random. Your new self was shaped from all the experiences of all your lives, from the circumstances of your death, from your hope and your guilt and your dreams. Missy’s life had been complex, fractured, painful; trapped between the destructive joy that lit up her blood and the quiet, desperate need for the Doctor’s friendship.

But she had found one perfect moment of clarity, as she’d turned her back on her past self and walked Doctorwards. In the instant that the blast had struck her, in the instant that she’d died, there had been no conflict and no uncertainties. She had regenerated in that moment, and been reborn in it. And she was beginning to think that it had turned her into something new.

*

She took a bath in one of the abandoned farmhouses, rinsing the blood of her two previous regenerations from her skin, examining this new form. Female again, which she was quite pleased with. A little taller than before, even better. Wispy blonde hair, not so great. According to the mirror she found, she had a softly rounded face which dimpled when she smiled, with a smattering of freckles across her nose. It was nothing like the Master-Mistress ought to look. But then, she didn’t feel like the Master any more. She didn’t feel like Missy.

She liked it. Except for the hair.

*

She understood why her past self had done it, of course. She had been him, after all.

Like all their other selves, he’d been both drawn to and repelled by the Doctor. Drawn to him enough to stage an elaborate invasion of Earth just to spend a year playing at keeping him captive; repelled enough to choose death (however temporary) over the terror of staying with him, over the possibility of redemption.  _Of being kept like a pet_ , his voice whispered in her mind.  _Of being his friend again_ , she replied. She had loved being him, she hadn’t lied when she said that, but it saddened her to remember how little he’d understood of what he actually wanted, of what the Doctor wanted, of what they could have been.

*  
  
Within a few days, she had the rudiments of a plan. First, foremost, and most obvious: she needed to get off this Cyberman-infested death ship. She had no TARDIS, but she’d found the specs for the escape pods and thought she could rig one of them into something more useful. She could use that to get to the nearest inhabited planet, and from there the universe was hers to...

To kill, to destroy, to enslave? No, she’d put that behind her when she’d chosen to stand with the Doctor. And to be honest, it just wasn’t appealing any more. To save, then, like the Doctor? Ugh. If she had to, she supposed, but she certainly wouldn’t be throwing herself into danger like her old friend did.

She decided that the universe was simply _hers_ , in some vague, generalised fashion. Decisions on what to do with it were pending.

*

The first thing she did upon landing was break into a clothes store and find something new to wear. Her last self’s clothes didn’t fit and didn’t suit her; they were the relics of a past life, and she was eager to cast them off. She picked out whatever pleased her; a purple dress as light as a breeze; a huge cardigan she wanted to snuggle into, some kind of tunic with a dozen pockets, a high-collared shirt covered in tiny pastel rainbows. None of it matched, but it hardly mattered; there was only one person in the universe whose opinions she actually cared about, and after what his sixth had worn he was hardly qualified to comment on sartorial idiosyncrasies.

Two days later she was back for another armful of clothes. Which was odd. Time Lords tended to pick one look and stick to it until they regenerated. While she and the Doctor were rebels in that they weren’t wearing terrible Prydonian robes and silly collars, they’d still both kept to one style for each regeneration. Now she couldn’t keep one appearance for more than a couple of days before it started to feel like a costume, like a lie.

And she, who’d once embraced disguises and deceptions with glee, now found herself throwing them off as fast as she could, reaching for the next one in hopes that it would be something real.

*

By the time she decided where to go, she had picked enough pockets to pay for a trip on on any ship she liked. There was only one destination she had any interest in: Earth, early twenty-first century. She’d died walking away from her past, to stand with the Doctor, and until she fulfilled that this regeneration would always have a restless itch between her hearts, driving her onward. Of course, she was a long way from Earth and in completely the wrong time period, but that just made it an adventure.

She picked out what the locals considered business-wear, with a gorgeous red skirt and makeup that could kill - metaphorically - and booked passage on a luxury liner that would get her a little closer to her goal. When the booking assistant asked her name, she said, ‘Missy.’ It was reflex, assumption. It wasn’t until she actually said it that she realised it felt wrong in her mouth, like a heavy dress, like a laser screwdriver set to kill. ‘The Master,’ she tried instead, but that was just as bad.

‘I’m sorry?’ the assistant asked.

‘Oh, put me down as Bill Potts, dear,’ she said, employing just a teeny bit of hypnotism to make the assistant forget there was anything odd about the booking. ‘At least it’ll give the Doctor a hearts-attack if he ever sees it.’

*

The ship took her to a pleasure planet called Artraxis, where she shaved her head back to her skull and experimented with loose silks and outrageous makeup. She picked a different name with everyone she spoke to, and before she left - hitchiking on a supply ship - she bought an electric blue wig, pierced her nose, and called herself Koschei.

She took the piercing out after three days, kept the wig a little longer. As soon as she landed, she dyed her own wispy remains brown and picked out a sensible knee-length dress printed with images of some local bird-like creature, only to throw them away the next day for auburn curls and a heavy coat, topped with a bright yellow scarf. She borrowed names from the Doctor’s old companions (Jo, Sarah-Jane, Tegan, Nyssa, Martha) or from Time Lords past and present (she called herself Rassilon once, laughing every time someone said the name, but used Doctor only sparingly) and from stars, planets, cities, people she’d met in passing at a market.

She didn’t think of herself as Missy any more, or as the Master, or as Koschei. She was a new thing, slipping through the universe, searching.

*

It took her weeks to realise the real irony.  
  
By killing her in that exact instant, when her hearts were set on joining the Doctor and her mind was clear and unconflicted, the Master had _ensured_ their next self would be reshaped around that decision. In his attempt to commit suicide (again) rather than join with the Doctor, he had ended up making his worst fear a certainty.

She realised this as she was wandering down a shopping street on a planet of six-armed humanoids, and had to sit down on the nearest bench and howl with laughter for so long that the local police were summoned to take her to the drunk tank.

*

One night she was in a bar, six colourful, umbrella-and-sparkler-filled cocktails spread out on the table before her so she could discover which ones she liked, when someone slipped into the booth next to her. She turned with an icy smile, one hand already reaching for the so-handy dagger she kept up her sleeve (yes, the same one she’d stabbed herself in the back with) - and recognised the man sitting beside her.

‘Captain Jack Harkness,’ he introduced himself, stretching an arm over the back of the booth, smiling brightly. ‘I’d offer to buy you a drink, but it looks like you’re covered.’

‘Oh, but you’re so _young_ ,’ she said - because he was. All baby-faced and bright eyed, and since there weren’t any waves of wrongness pouring off him, he mustn’t even have met the Doctor yet.

He looked surprised, but rolled with it. ‘Old enough to have the experience, young enough to have the stamina,’ he said with a wink.

He was still a Time Agent; she could see the device on his wrist. Now, she was doing fine with her hitchhiking through space, but time travel was harder to come by. She’d had no luck so far finding a way to get to the right time to find the Doctor. And it would be so very easy to pretend to be seduced, just long enough to swipe that time machine on his wrist. Or to actually allow it - he was gorgeous, after all - and then bat her eyelashes and ask for a lift. She might have lost her taste for killing, but she didn’t normally have moral scruples about that kind of thing.

Normally.

She leaned in and pressed a kiss to his forehead, then pushed all six of the cocktails towards him. ‘You have these,’ she told him, sliding out of the other side of the booth. ‘I think I owe you a drink. Try the pink one first, it’s delicious.’

‘Hey, wait!’ he called after her as she walked out of the bar, but she didn’t look back.

*

On the worst days, nothing felt right. Everything she tried on felt heavy and cumbersome on her skin, like it didn’t fit. Even clothes tailored specifically to her figure felt wrong. It wasn’t a tactile sensitivity; she could touch things just fine, could bury herself in a pile of conflicting textures if she wanted to. It was wearing them, costuming herself in them. Sometimes it was so frustrating she cried at the irritation of it, and then hated herself for crying.

It was the itch of a caterpillar in its cocoon, suffocating in a cage of its own making, waiting to burst out and become something new.

The problem was that she didn’t know who she was any more, who she was becoming. The clothes and the hair, the appearance and the name - they were just a symptom of that. Until her identity crisis was over, nothing would ever feel better than acceptable. 

And she’d lived long enough, and changed often enough, to know there would be no single defining moment when she knew who she was, no bursting from the chrysalis. Change was a process, not an event. It would take time; even a Time Lady couldn’t escape that.

*

She needed money, and on a whim, she decided to get a job rather than hack into a bank or engage in a little petty theft. An actual job, with a wage, like normal people - the idea was oddly charming.

Rather than go through the tedium of interviewing, she wandered into a nice-looking clothes store and hypnotised the manager to ignore her lack of references, identification or experience and give her a job, starting first thing tomorrow. She liked clothes, despite her current difficulties with them. How hard could it be?

She lasted three hours, but she only sent one customer to hospital with a crushed scrotum, so on the whole she thought it could have gone much worse.

That night, she stowed away on a ship headed a few dozen lightyears closer to Earth. When she was inevitably found, she made excellent use of her black eye from the earlier fight, spinning a story about an abusive husband and a desperate escape. The sympathetic captain agreed to give her passage in return for helping out with chores around the ship. It was just as tedious as the shop work, but having got here by her own cleverness and deceit, she found she minded it much less. And this time no one tried to flirt with her.

*

She knew the man in the bar was trouble, of course. Far too interested in an apparently-young woman on her own. Far too charming, in a glib, false way. And far too eager to offer her a lift to wherever she wanted to go.

She could have refused and walked away, but there would be no fun in that at all. And then he would just find another innocent girl to target, and as someone who was now more-or-less on the side of good, she couldn’t allow that, could she? It was very easy to play the wide-eyed ingenue, turning pink at flirtation and laughing at his jokes and having no idea that anything bad could ever happen to her. She’d picked out a little floral sundress and strappy sandals that morning, so she even looked the part. He didn’t suspect a thing.

When they were on his ship and in space, far away from any source of help, he suddenly turned violent. She begged and pleaded, and found she hated doing that even if it was a show. As soon as he brought the rope out to tie her up she dropped the act and kicked him in the stomach, ripped the rope from his hands and wrapped it round his neck, squeezing until he passed out. She tied him to a chair, and wandered off to see what tools she could find on his ship. Time for the fun bit.

*

She had not turned good _because_ she was a woman.

She wanted that on the record, even though for the moment the only record that mattered was the one inside her own head, the only opinion she cared about her own. Her last self hadn’t been too concerned with existential questions, hadn’t much cared why she’d regenerated as she had. She’d just embraced the change, flung herself headlong into being a madwoman instead of a madman. This time round she was more contemplative. 

There had to be a reason why after so many centuries, both things had happened so close together. So why _had_ she become female? While regeneration was chaotic, it was still based on what was already there. As a rule, their kind didn’t change gender unless they wanted to, or at least didn’t care either way. And the Master had just been stabbed in the back by his female future self, had killed her because he didn’t want to become the person who would make those choices. So becoming in any way like her would have been the last thing he’d have wanted as the golden light burst through his skin.

_He_ had certainly thought her change in heart was connected to her change in gender. He’d said as much. And he was wrong, she could feel it - but teasing an actual explanation out of the events of her life was yet another slow, changing thing, something that required time.

*

She might not have any real desire to hurt people any more, but she also lacked an aversion to it. However, the Doctor wouldn’t approve of torture, even if it was deserved. He’d never find out about it, but she should probably start as she meant to go on rather than risk picking up bad habits. Therefore, torture was out.

Of course, her abductor didn’t know that.

He woke up tied to a chair, with her sat on a table in front of him, giggling and swinging her legs, every object that could possibly be used for torture arrayed suggestively around her. She didn’t need to lay a finger on him, simply raved breathlessly about how much fun this was going to be, how much her previous victims had screamed, picking a tool and talking at great length about what she was going to do to him with it before abandoning it on an apparent whim, taking up another and considering its possibilities, pretending at indecision. Having actually tortured people in the past helped make it real, and before long he was sobbing, begging her to let him go.

‘I have an idea for a game!’ she said, clapping her hands. ‘We’re going to call the police!’ She set up the comm in front of him, pointing the camera towards his face. ‘You’re going to tell them what a naughty boy you’ve been, every little detail of everyone you’ve kidnapped. I always love hearing that. And then,’ she leaned closer, conspiratorial, ‘we’ll see whether they get here before I’m finished! Won’t that be fun?’

*

He babbled everything to the police, barely able to stammer the details of one crime before his fear drive him to confess the next one, sobbing and begging them to come quickly before the madwoman could kill him. She left as soon as he was finished - she hardly wanted to be arrested herself - and took one of the ship’s escape pods, plotting a course for somewhere she could find a genuine lift. Even in the cramped space of the escape pod, she was bubbling over with glee. It had been  _fun_ \- and not from the threats or the thoughts of violence, like before, but from the pleasure of manipulating him, of outsmarting him. Of winning. 

The Doctor wouldn’t approve of her means, but he couldn’t criticise the ends, and she thought she’d fallen into the sweet spot - far enough outside his comfort zone for him to disapprove, not far enough for him to condemn. Good. She was never going to behave exactly as he wanted her to; it would be terribly boring if they stopped challenging each other.

*

When she got tired of hitchiking, she spent three days at a casino on Doriania VI and won a time-travel-capable ship in a game of Toranchian Poker. She didn’t even cheat on the winning hand; the thrill of the gamble was too much fun.

Her new ship was  _gorgeous_ , a slender luxury model in bright crimson with bronze accents. She fell in love with it before she even opened the door. Inside, there was a glass wall in the tiny living room and simulated water in the sonic shower, the most comfortable beds she’d slept on all regeneration and a flight so smooth the vacuum of space could have been made of black silk. It was incredibly cramped for someone used to the dimensional transcendence of a TARDIS, but she found herself liking even that. It was cosy, it was home; it reminded her a little of her Vault, in a way that felt strangely pleasant rather than confining.

The last owner had named it  _Maxinarus Three_ , after himself. She changed its name to  _Missy_. It felt right, and even as she changed her own name every other week, the ship’s stayed the same.

Apart from that, the only major change she made was to clear out the second bedroom, which left just enough room to add a piano. If the Doctor ever ended up joining her on board, he could sleep on the sofa.

*

She pieced the explanation together slowly over weeks, like the jigsaw puzzles the Doctor had brought her to pass time in the Vault. It came down to the drums. They’d been part of her mind since she was eight; the call of the Time War echoing through her mind, the screams of the dying and the carnage of the battlefields, destruction on an unimaginable scale. Was it any wonder that little boy had gone mad? Rassilon’s call in his head, driving him to war, creating the psychopathic soldier they’d wanted when they resurrected him.

And then the drums had served their purpose, had been  _gone_. It hadn’t cured his madness, not immediately; the damage had been far too extensive for that. It had taken one regeneration to reach the point where Missy had even the seeds of the potential for goodness, and another one to heal her mind to the point she was at now - not good, really, but not evil either. Perhaps the future would bring more changes, perhaps not; but she was pleased with herself as a work in progress.

That first regeneration after the drums had also been the point where Master became Missy, and she thought the new silence in her head explained that as well. The drums had been part of her neural landscape for millennia, and the lack of them was so fundamental an alteration that her subconscious had struggled to deal with it. How could you reflect so dramatic a change just by making the body a little taller and altering the hair colour? Switching genders was probably the most dramatic change her body could make, so that was what it had done. She should be glad it was impossible to regenerate into a different species, or she’d probably have woken up as a Sontaran.

She had no way of knowing if her theory was true, of course. All the Time Lord doctors and psychiatrists who could have helped were far away, and she’d have laughed at their pathetic insights anyway. But the explanation was good enough for her, which was all that mattered.

*

Now that she had her own ship, progress towards Earth was easier. The  _Missy_ was limited in how far it could jump through space or time without stopping to refuel, but she was always moving in the right direction, and it was easier to pick exactly where and when she wanted to stop.

She did the tourist things. Visited museums, libraries, architectural feats; the Sapphire Pyramids of the Nexus, the infinite waterfalls at the edge of Praxia, the Singing Fields, the birth and death of stars. She parked her ship in front of a temporal anomaly and watched through her huge glass window as a nebula formed in the space of a few hours.

She did the non-tourist things. Visited planets that didn’t even appear on the star charts, wandered round asteroids where the children stared at her in wonder, the first person they’d ever seen whose skin wasn’t blue. She sweet-talked locals into letting her stay on their sofa for a night or two, fixed oddments of farm machinery in return for a meal. She only stole from the people who deserved it.

It was exactly what they’d planned to do as two young boys back on Gallifrey, dreaming of the stars, and while it was fun, there was an empty space beside her.

*

And then she landed in the middle of a civil war.

Her first instinct was to leave; she had no real interest in getting involved in any of it. But then she thought, why not? The Doctor had been planning on testing her, hadn’t he, before the Cybermen turned up and everything went wrong. And if they were going to do this properly, to be friends and stand together as they’d always dreamed, then she was in for a lot of time spent running round Saving People Heroically. Why not take proper goodness out for a spin?

So she stepped out of her ship, introduced herself as Koschei (just in case he was listening) and went to meddle.

The Doctor would doubtlessly have joined up with the rebels, helped them lead a dramatic overthrow of their oppressors, and left them setting up a new government in peace and harmony and blah blah blah. She could have done that, certainly, but it sounded so terribly dull and frankly inefficient.

Instead, she walked into the headquarters of the oppressive regime and hypnotised them into handing over the entire system over to her - just for a little while while they all took a well-earned vacation to this planet’s version of the subtropics. It wouldn’t last very long, but long enough. As soon as they were out of the picture, she went through the records of all their underlings - the people who actually made the system work. Those who’d committed atrocities she had imprisoned; those who had simply done their jobs she fired, and those who’d actively tried to help in whatever small ways they could she promoted. Then she called the rebel leaders to the governmental palace, kicked out the ones who were too extremist to be allowed any power (she could tell, she recognised the look in their eyes) and handed things over to the rest of them.

She stayed for a few days while they got things up and running, warned them about the return of the old leaders, accepted their gracious thanks and generous presents, and left. And she hadn’t even needed to assassinate anyone.

*

She was wandering  through a marketplace, trying to decide whether to go back for that pretty dress she’d seen. She knew she wouldn’t wear it for more than a day or two before it was thrown out in the name of her constant attempts to find a stable self-image - and then she was distracted by the sound of crying from behind a stack of crates. Well. She ought to look, she supposed.

She peered round the crates and discovered exactly what she had hoped not to find; a child. Small, humanoid, female, with a very pink face and wide eyes. ‘Hello?’ she said, hovering by the crates. ‘Is something wrong or are you just crying because that’s what small people do?’

The girl sniffled. ‘I can’t find my momma!’

Right. The Doctor would go and say something comforting and help the child back to her parents, and it would all be very nice and goody-goody, and unfortunately for this particular child, the Doctor wasn’t here. ‘Listen,’ she said, crouching before the child. ‘Are you being manipulated by aliens, forced into child labour, controlled by a dystopian government, or in any other way in the middle of something you’d expect to find in a Dickens novel if Dickens had been into sci-fi?’

The girl stared at her, apparently startled into not crying. Handy to know that worked. ‘Um. No? I don’t think so?’

‘Good. Well, you’re out of my jurisdiction,’ she said, getting to her feet, turning her back, and leaving. There was a middle-aged woman close by with a teenage son moodily following behind her; she tapped the woman on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘there’s a lost girl behind those crates, could you go and help her so I can do literally _anything_ else? Thank you so much,’ she said, and walked on before the woman could say anything. Another crisis solved. She thought she would go back for that dress after all.

 *

 If her hands weren’t tied behind her back, she’d have her face buried in them to hide from the endless, terrible monologue. Oh, she knew full well the delight of explaining your plan in loving detail to your enemies, the better to impress them, but - honestly, this one could have been made by a five-year-old.

‘Will you shut up?’ she interrupted, when she couldn’t take it any more. Her captor did, blinking with all six of his insectoid eyes. ‘I’m sorry, but it’ll never work, you do realise that? Your so called allies will turn on you the instant they have what they want, and anyone who wants to stop you only needs to - Oh, no,’ she realised, having a sudden and very unwelcome epiphany. ‘I think I planned more or less exactly the same thing once. How embarrassing. Still, I at least had the excuse that I was utterly insane at the time. You don’t.’

He pulled himself up to his full (not very impressive) height, chittered, and declared, ‘I can never be defeated!’

‘Yes, I’m afraid you will be, my dear. Listen - what is it you actually _want_ out of all of this? Because there’s probably an easier way to get it. Have you considered going into politics?’

*

She wasn’t good. 

Not Good with a capital G, at least; not the Doctor’s kind of good. She might not have any particular desire to kill people, but she didn’t feel any particular desire not to, either. She refrained because murder was generally frowned upon and was therefore often inconvenient. And because she knew it would upset the Doctor - much as in her previous life there’d been certain songs she didn’t play on her piano when the Doctor was around, because they reminded him of things. 

Some nights, she worried that her version of good wouldn’t be enough for him. He’d been so concerned with Missy feeling remorse, with all that tiresome crying over her actions and her dead. The regret had mostly faded with this regeneration. She still disapproved, vaguely, but it was faded and disconnected from herself - like she was looking at the deeds of someone else.

She was what she was. If the Doctor whined about it, wanted some big pantomime display of self-flagellation, he would have to forget about it and take her as she was. He wasn’t exactly perfect either.

Besides. Sometimes death was necessary; even the Doctor would agree. As much as he hated killing, there was so much blood on those hands, and she knew that every drop of it weighed on his hearts. (He’d killed her once, through inaction: stood and watched as he burned in the flames, begging for his life. She would remind him of that if he argued - it always made him so guilty.) Perhaps he would eventually see it was a good thing, having someone who could take that burden from him, when it was needed.

*

Earth. Two thousand and nineteen, London, summer. She had made it.

Of course, the Doctor wasn’t there right at that moment, but it was only a matter of time before he needed to pick up a new human or stop someone taking over the planet. She did consider staging an invasion to get his attention, but it wouldn’t give the best impression. She would have to wait.

She was bored out of her mind within two weeks. It was worse than being in the Vault. She may have her freedom, but at least in the Vault she’d had decent company. Once thing that hadn’t changed in this regeneration was her disdain for humans, with their brief little lives, their ignorance, their idiocy. The Doctor hand-picked his travelling companions, and even they were usually tedious. The average human was even worse.

She took her ship up to the middle of the Lake District, set up a perception filter to keep people from noticing, and relaxed with only the occasional fell walker to disturb her. When that became boring she moved the ship around the world, taking in different views, different landscapes. She played the piano a lot, and read, and was so bored she thought she might actually turn evil again just to be done with it. Maybe she could assassinate someone. She’d already taken out one American president, and given the current incumbent, she could probably persuade the Doctor that killing him counted as saving the world,

Instead, she gritted her teeth, returned to England, and sought out UNIT.

*

She’d like to say that she didn’t need the Doctor, but it wasn’t exactly true; she was sane enough to know that now, and to know that it went both ways. They’d always defined each other. Even as children, no one had ever spoken of one of them without speaking of the other. She’d nicknamed him Theta; he’d come up with Koschei. And while Doctor and Master had been monikers each had chosen themselves, after their friendship darkened and twisted - well, the seeds of those self-definitions had been in their childhood debates and burning arguments.

Later, as enemies, they’d still orbited around each other, and while their interactions were colder, crueler, they still each wrought changes on the other’s being. She hadn’t been able to admit that back then, but it was true. Her entire history had been shaped by the Doctor, just as his had been shaped by her.

And now that their endless pushing and pulling had brought her to this regeneration, to a self that was ready to be friends again... well, she didn’t, strictly speaking, _need_ the Doctor there to figure out who she was now.

But it would help.

*

She presented herself as a friend of the Doctor, just an eccentric scholar who’d been in the area and would very much like to meet up with an old friend, and if they had anything to do to keep her occupied while she waited, why, she’d be delighted to help. They were suspicious at first, but dropping hints about all the knowledge that she’d be happy to share with UNIT’s scientists quickly got them interested. Greed was one of the easiest flaws to manipulate. At least some of the people here were worth talking to for more than five minutes, and much as the Doctor had found when he’d been stranded here, it was a diversion.

Her disguise (”Call me Joan Smith, my dear, I’m afraid you wouldn’t be able to pronounce my real name”) was perfect, and for a full two months, no one was the least bit suspicious. Until the rainy Wednesday morning when her attempts to build a temporal disruptor from a microwave and the contents of a chemistry lab were interrupted by a bright, cheerful, familiar voice.

‘Hello there! Hope I’m not interrupting, but they told me you knew the Doctor and I just had to pop in.’ She looked up, and found the nostalgia of being around UNIT again made manifest: Miss Grant. Much older, of course, but still instantly recognisable.

She had a very bad feeling about this.

*

‘You know, you remind me of someone,’ Jo said, barely fifteen minutes after they’d introduced themselves.

‘Do I? How lovely. Who would that be?’

‘There was another Time Lord friend of the Doctor’s who used to hang around Earth. Called himself the Master.’

‘Oh, I remember him from the Academy! Terrible sort. Didn’t he invade this planet a few times?’

Jo gave her a flat, disbelieving look. ‘Give me one reason why I shouldn’t run out of here and tell everyone who you really are.’

Curse the Doctor’s human pets. None of their species should be this perceptive - but she remembered this one had been particularly tricky back when they’d first met. ‘I’m not him,’ she said, and then admitted, ‘Not any more.’

‘That’s not how regeneration works. The Doctor’s still the Doctor no matter how many times he changes bodies - and you’re still you.’

But Jo hadn’t gone to tell everyone the truth yet. She was still listening; that meant she was willing to be persuaded. ‘People change. You humans manage it, and you only have a handful of decades and no regenerations to shake things up. It’s been... oh, millennia since I last saw you, Mrs Jones. Is it that hard to believe I could be different?’ Jo sat back in her chair, looking thoughtful. ‘What do I have to do to persuade you?’

‘Tell me what made you change,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything.’

*

It took hours.

She’d intended to give Jo the simple version, keep the messy details out of it, focus on the big redemption arc. But Jo kept asking questions and demanding answers, and bit by bit, the irritating human prised everything out of her. She was surprised by how easily it all came out, how little she fought to keep her secrets. Perhaps it was because she’d been alone with her thoughts too long. She’d got used to having the Doctor to talk to when she was in the Vault, and then she’d been alone this whole regeneration, trying to sort the recent past out in her head. To understand how the Master had become Missy had become herself, trying to comprehend where she’d come from so she could see where she was going.

They ended up on the floor of the little apartment UNIT had provided her with, a bottle of gin half-emptied between them, while she told Jo how furious she was with Rassilon and the rest of the Time Lords, how they’d warped her with their drumbeat and then cut her loose when she wasn’t needed any more and left her not knowing who she was. She paused for breath, pouring more gin into her glass with an unsteady hand. ‘I didn’t know I was angry until now,’ she confessed. ‘I didn’t even care until this regeneration.’

Jo gently took the gin bottle from her hand and poured her some more, then put the bottle conspicuously behind herself. ‘I’d like to give that Rassilon a piece of my mind.’ she said, and the thought of tiny elderly Jo lecturing Rassilon himself - and she would do it, too - sent her into peals of laughter.

Jo patted her on the shoulder. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we should get you to bed.’

*

Some nights she was afraid of what would happen when she finally found the Doctor.

She had no way of knowing how long it would have been for him, when they met again. He could have regenerated - probably would have, after the battle with the Cybermen - and who knew how his feelings about her would have changed in the meantime. He could have given up on the project of her redemption, written her off as a bad idea. There had been plenty of times when her past selves had wanted an alliance, wanted the Doctor to stand by their side and rule the universe, only to be rejected - and plenty of times it had been the other way round, and he had pushed the Doctor away. Even as Missy, she’d had to be almost executed and locked in a vault before they began to find their way back together. Now that she wanted friendship, who was to say he would want it too?

*

The next week, Jo turned up and invited her to the cinema. Her motivation was obvious - keeping an eye on the monster, making sure it didn’t relapse and become a danger. She supposed it was a reasonable price to pay in return for Jo keeping her secret, just as long as the film was decent.

It was a romcom, and it was terrible, and they both got thrown out of the cinema for criticising it loudly and throwing popcorn at the screen. 

The next week they went for cocktails; Jo was out of the UK for a while after that, but she kept texting, and returned with an invite to a little bakery that apparently did the best red velvet cake in all of London. The next week it was a theme park (rollercoasters were dull when you’d travelled through the Time Vortex) and after that a far more enjoyable spa day. When Jo said she regretted not getting to travel more with the Doctor, well, it was easy enough to take the  _Missy_ for a quick spin back to Renaissance Italy.

It was absolutely nothing like the Doctor taking his little companions on adventures. They didn’t have to run around saving the day, for one.

She still had to go sit on the roof of UNIT HQ and yell at the sky (the Doctor was up there somewhere, after all) when she realised that she and Jo had become _friends_.

*

‘I am glad you’ve changed,’ Jo said, one evening over a Chinese takeaway.

‘Really? I’d never have guessed,’ she said, and at Jo’s look, elaborated. ‘Considering it was your planet I mostly tried to take over, it’s hardly surprising.’

‘Well, yes - but I meant for the Doctor’s sake. And yours. It was so obvious that you two really just wanted to stop fighting and be friends again and could never figure out how to. I was always rooting for you both.’

She blinked at Jo in surprise; she hadn’t expected that from this odd little human, currently focused intently on scooping up a forkful of noodles without making a mess. Considering how she and the Doctor had acted around each other back then, she supposed Jo had a point. It had been lifetimes ago, their proper enmity only just beginning: the beat of the drums in the Master’s head, and the beat of the Doctor’s oh-so-compassionate hearts, driving them further apart. Jo had been the first of the Doctor’s humans she’d ever met. Thanks to the complexities of time travel, almost their whole lives off Gallifrey were tucked neatly into the span of one fragile human’s existence. She had been there at the beginning, and she was here as everything changed. It felt terribly appropriate.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ she said.

*

It was a damp Tuesday morning when her phone buzzed with a message from one of the UNIT technicians.  _Hey Joan! The Doctor’s TARDIS just landed! Thought you should know, emailing you the coordinates._

She took the  _Missy_ and went. The TARDIS had landed just the other side of the city, but her ship was still the fastest way to travel (and she despised the Underground). She could feel her heartsbeats thrumming in her fingertips where they pressed against the controls. She landed on a rooftop, invisible; it was windy and drizzling as she stepped out, looking over the city. Down there. The Doctor was here.

She followed the faint telepathic trace of Time Lord led to a street lined with tired shops, and scanned the crowds for her friend - she’d always be able to recognise the Doctor, not matter the face. And there she was, sitting on a bench in the open - and it was _she_ , this time round. It was oddly flattering; hadn’t she been thinking, in those long months of wandering and wondering, that the two of them had always orbited each other, changed each other, redefined each other? And now that she was on her second body as a woman, here was the Doctor, following along.

This new Doctor was wearing an elegant emerald-green shawl, short enough not to hamper her movement, with a plain t-shirt and jeans underneath. She was blonde as well, her hair almost down to her shoulders; the only thing that made her stand out among the humans was the tracking device blinking conspicuously in her lap.

This was it. Their reunion. She should go up to her, say something - but she couldn’t bring herself to go straight up to the Doctor. This was, after all, the moment she found out if her friendship could be accepted. She _wanted_ , but she was nervous, and so she made a game of it; sitting on the opposite bench and staring silently, waiting to be noticed.

It took four long minutes. Then the Doctor froze for an instant before looking up, eyes locking instantly on to her own. No question of recognition, in these new bodies; the Doctor had always recognised her unless she’d been deliberately trying to hide. She got to her feet and walked the incredibly long few steps over to the other bench; the Doctor was standing too, staring at her in surprise (and oh, she hoped she was a good surprise). ‘Missy? What are you doing here?’

The Doctor raised her tracking device like she was about to ask about whatever dull problem was going on this time - nothing she cared even an iota about right now, mostly-reformed or not. Instead, she took one last step forwards and pulled her into a tight hug, and was more relieved than she could possibly have said when the Doctor hugged back.

‘It’s not Missy any more,’ she said, and, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

*

The Doctor was here because Earth was being invaded, _again_. It was getting tiresome. The Doctor got taken prisoner less than five minutes after stepping on to the invader’s ship. And one of the Doctor’s pet humans would probably have tried to stop it, but she wasn’t one of _them_ , and she had no interest in getting herself taken prisoner too. Therefore, she hid around the corner and rolled her eyes while the Doctor was taken away.

The ship’s layout was fairly standard; she could have figured out where the cells were and staged a breakout. However, the Doctor didn’t appear to be in any actual danger, and was more than capable of getting herself out of her own mess. And since the Doctor was temporarily out of the picture, it was time to do things her own way.

The Doctor had never really understood the mindset of people who simply didn’t care about compassion or justice or all those other virtues. She could make some very lovely speeches about being good, yes, but they meant nothing to someone who was only concerned with money, or power, or any of the usual vices. Therefore, rather than trying anything dramatic, she wandered into the main communications centre and politely asked to speak to whoever was in charge.

Taking inspiration from the Rani, she presented herself as a humble scientist who was doing research on humans and would like her facilities left alone. She spun some wild inventions about bio-synthesising some rare minerals, let their eyes gleam with the possibility of profit; good, she had them interested. She drew their story out of them, which was typically dull - their home planet Tarinna was dying, they needed somewhere new to live, they’d chosen Earth, who cared if it was already occupied? Only then did she bring up the Doctor. Out of curiosity, how did they have her contained? Locked in a cell, nothing else. Oh. Well, if they thought that was enough... Only hadn’t they heard what had happened to all the other invasions?

She painted a gloriously dramatic depiction of the Doctor’s heroism, if she did say so herself - enough to make the Tarinnans start whispering, glancing uncertainly at the little blue planet they’d come here for. Let them wonder if the rewards were worth the effort. Then she casually mentioned that she was surprised they hadn’t gone somewhere uninhabited, like that nice world a few months away from here, hadn’t they looked at that one? A lovely place, she’d been for a picnic there once. No higher life forms. Lots of precious metals. Practically utopia. She exaggerated it slightly, but by the time they discovered that they’d be several years into colony building and disinclined to move.

By the time the Doctor broke out of prison and arrived on the command deck, the Tarinnan leader was shouting at his underlings for not noticing this alternate opportunity sooner, while the navigation staff plotted a new flight course. They all ducked and hid at the appearance of the Doctor; she leaned over to the nearest one and promised she’d take care of this. ‘Now now, it’s all been a big misunderstanding,’ she told the Doctor, taking her by the arm and steering her out of the room. ‘Look at the navigation consoles, they were just leaving, see?’

She explained what she’d really done when they got back to Earth, and the Doctor looked like she didn’t quite know what to make of any of it. It was delightful.  
  
*

Once everything had been neatly concluded, they wound up outside the Doctor’s TARDIS. It was waiting for them in the middle of a tiny park that sported little more than grass and a handful of trees, and in the bright grey air just before sunrise, it almost seemed to glow. The Doctor grinned, and opened her mouth, very clearly about to launch into the same speech she gave her humans.

‘No. I am inviting _myself_ along, Doctor,’ she interrupted. ‘You don’t get a say in it.’

‘It’s my TARDIS.’

‘Really? I hadn’t noticed. Ground rules: I’m not one of your little pets, and I’m not going to walk around with my mouth hanging open asking stupid questions so you can look clever, or follow along obediently and do things your way. We’re equals, or we don’t do this at all.

The Doctor looked amused. ‘You’re the one setting ground rules? After everything?’

‘Yes,’ she said, defiant. ‘Why? Don’t I have the right to?’  
  
‘... Yes. Of course you do. I’m sorry.’ The Doctor shook her head, brushing some rain-dampened hair from her face. ‘Do I get to set some too, then?’

‘I suppose.’ She waited to hear the restrictions that she knew were already there; no killing, nothing evil, play nice and smile at the universe. Instead, the Doctor just stepped forwards and took hold of her hands.

‘I’ve been waiting centuries to get to travel the stars with you,’ she said, her voice intense. ‘I won’t screw it up if you don’t.’

A dozen quips and comments flitted through her head, but she dismissed them. The moment felt too fragile and solemn for that. ‘Deal.’

*

The first thing she did, before the Doctor could drag her directly into some kind of death-defying adventure, was insist on picking up the  _Missy_ , which fit neatly into one of the TARDIS’s spare hangars. The second thing she did was sit the Doctor down and show her the footage of what had happened back on the colony ship, of how she’d regenerated.

‘Well, that was... depressing,’ was the first thing the Doctor said. ‘If you’d wanted to watch something, we could have gone back to Earth and seen some kind of superhero film, there’s always a new one out these days-’

‘Doctor,’ she said, reprimanding. This was important.

The Doctor gave an odd sort of half-smile and turned towards her, resting her head against the back of the overstuffed sofa. ‘You didn’t need to show me that, you know,’ she said. ‘I would have believed you.’

‘I wanted to be sure,’ she said. ‘You haven’t always had a great track record on believing me in the past. That debacle in the Death Zone comes to mind.’

‘Well, that was then and this is now,’ the Doctor said. And then - without any more questions or demands for explanations - the Doctor dismissed the recording and turned to her with excitement written all over her face. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Where do you want to go first?’

*

They were running through a corridor (because of course they were running), when something buzzed against her thigh.

‘Wait a minute!’ she shouted, skidding to a stop and pulling her phone out of her pocket. The Doctor looked at her oddly.

‘You have a phone?’

‘I was living in England, 2019, for three months before you turned up. Yes, I have a phone. I don’t think your pet humans can live without them, I’m surprised they’re not welded to their hands - oh, bugger.’ In the excitement of actually finding the Doctor again, she’d completely forgotten to text Jo.

‘Bugger?’ the Doctor asked, a smirk curling around the corner of her lips. ‘You really did go native.’

‘Come here, you arsehole, selfie time,’ she said, slipping her arm through the Doctor’s and raising her phone at an angle to snap a pic. She got one of herself smiling and the Doctor looking slightly bemused; perfect. She sent it.

‘What was that for?

‘Quickest way of explaining to Jo why I’m skipping out on the quad biking day she talked me into.’

‘Jo?’ the Doctor asked, and then her face went a delightfully peculiar shade of pale as she put two and two together. ‘Wait, Jo _Grant_? You’re... friends with Jo Grant?’

‘Jones now, and yes. I’m almost as horrified as you are.’ She was about to make another quip, but then a roar echoed down the corridor towards them, deep enough to make the walls tremble. She grabbed the Doctor’s hand. ‘Run!’

*

When they were out of the TARDIS, the Doctor called her by whatever pseudonym she felt like - unless she decided to tease, and introduced herself as Martha or Sarah-Jane or Nyssa. Which led to the most delightful indignant glares until she chose something else - although if she didn’t, the Doctor would just pick another name herself. Which once led to an entire week of being called Ermintrude, when they got separated from the TARDIS in the diamond maze of the Stellar Consortium. For the first time in this regeneration she’d actually been tempted to commit murder.

When it was just the two of them, the Doctor mostly called her Koschei. It didn’t fit, exactly. That was the name of a Gallifreyan child, dreaming of the stars, having nightmares of war. But it was nostalgic, and in some ways they were trying to go back to that, to start all over again with what should have been. It was acceptable as a nickname, but it wasn’t her.

Sometimes, the Doctor would use her original name - not her  _real_ name, because the whole point was that she didn’t have one any more. Just as the Doctor’s real name was the Doctor, whatever she’d been called when they first met back at the Academy. But she liked the sound of her old name on the Doctor’s lips, a reminder of just how long and how deeply they’d known each other, that they could use these ancient and forgotten names for something as ephemeral as asking for sugar in their tea.

The Doctor suggested names, sometimes. Titles (the Wanderer, the Traveller, the Friend - for which she’d been elbowed really hard in her skinny ribs) or common names from Gallifrey, characters from legends or people they’d known. All of them were rejected.

*

She parked the  _Missy_ on top of the dam, and they both climbed up onto her hull to watch the water flood the valley. They should probably have changed clothes first - they were both soaked through from falling off the dam earlier - but it was raining so hard it wouldn’t have made much difference. 

She was getting a headache from how furiously the Doctor was thinking. (Not that she was touching the Doctor’s thoughts; they were sat a few inches apart, and it might as well have been a few miles.) With great patience, she gave the Doctor a few minutes to brood, and then snapped. ‘Oh, get it over with already.’

‘You don’t care about any of them,’ the Doctor said, soft enough it could barely be heard over the rain. ‘Do you?’

They’d saved most of the villages from the flood, either by evacuating them or diverting the water to spare the higher ones entirely. The Alrinae, who had planned to flood the valley for living space and lay eggs in the corpses of the drowned, had been thoroughly thwarted. Only the lowest village had been flooded, the water from the dam cascading on them too fast for any warning.

She regretted it, because she was a perfectionist and even partial failure annoyed her. She felt a distant kind of pity for them, she supposed; drowning was a horrible way to die. But mostly she was concerned for the Doctor, sitting there with her hair plastered to her skull, staring out over the valley in despair.

‘I care that you care.’

‘But you don’t care about _them_ ,’ the Doctor accused, her hands tightening on the edges of her soaking coat. ‘They drowned. Dozens of people. Children. And you don’t feel anything.’

Well. She’d been expecting this conversation. ‘I’m not one of your compassionate humans, Doctor,’ she reminded her. ‘And I’m certainly not you. And never will be. No, I don’t  _care_. I still nearly broke my neck trying to get down to the control room in time to divert the water. I still saved people’s lives, instead of killing them, because it matters to you. If that’s not enough for you, you’re welcome to leave me at the nearest interstellar port. Or throw me back in the Vault.’

‘No,’ the Doctor said, almost instantly, and she hadn’t known how much she’d feared the Doctor abandoning her until she heard that no. ‘I’m not doing that. It’s just...’ For the first time since they’d come out onto the hull the Doctor actually looked at her, rain dripping off her eyelashes, looking utterly bedraggled but no less serious, no less determined. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. You’re doing the right thing, that’s what’s important. I just forget, now we’re on the same side at least, that you’re... not here for the same reasons.’

‘Apology accepted,’ she said, and the Doctor smiled - though it was faint and a little watery, her attention being drawn inevitably back to the valley. After a few more minutes, her face began to scrunch up. She pulled the Doctor’s head down onto her shoulder, letting her cry it out. When the tears were done, she’d drag her back inside and get them both out of their wet things, make some tea, distract her with some new idea or with TARDIS maintenance. The practicalities. Let the Doctor handle feelings; they’d balance each other out.

*

They were lost. And not a simple kind of lost; they were stuck in twisting chasms far below the planet’s surface, with barely six hours of light left in their torch, while pursued by whispering, telepathic aliens who had already managed to infect the Doctor with a mind parasite. 

The Doctor kept humming a little tune while gazing off into nothingness, forgetting where and who she was. Their working theory was that the music was the carrier for the infection - the shape it took in the brain. The comparison to the drums was deeply unsettling, and she was trying not to think of it.

They stopped for five minutes of rest and a few swallows of water from their rapidly emptying supply. The Doctor leaned her head back against the cold stone with her eyes closed, humming a few notes and stopping herself and humming a few more, trying to fight it off. 

‘You could get over here and help,’ she snapped suddenly, ‘Miss top-of-the-class-in-anything-telepathic-and-never-lets-you-forget-it.’

‘I didn’t think you’d want me to.”  
  
The Doctor stared at her in utter disbelief, before her expression suddenly softened, the corners of her eyes creasing. ‘Course I do. Get over here.’

They were only a few steps apart, but it felt much further. She crouched down on the stone - they were far enough underground for it to be warm - and didn’t do the Doctor the disservice of asking if she was sure. She settled her fingers on either side of the Doctor’s temples, pressed their foreheads together, and pushed. 

Oh, but it felt good, to touch the Doctor’s mind again. They hadn’t shared this since she’d made him pay attention to the drums, kneeling in a junkyard and far too mad to appreciate the chaotic fractal swirls of the Doctor’s mind, the warmth of those old emotions curling round her like everything she’d spent centuries unable to admit she wanted.   
  
It wasn’t hard to follow the thread of music, pluck the parasite from her friend’s mind and unpick it into nothingness. ‘Top of the class again, Koschei,’ the Doctor said, and didn’t pull away, letting their minds stay tangled together. They ought to be moving on; they had a long trek out of the chasms, and their light source would run out, and there would inevitably be another disaster waiting for them somewhere along the way - but it was a long few minutes of sitting there before she could bring herself to say so.

*

She still changed her appearance every other day - and the wardrobe in the Doctor’s TARDIS made that easier than ever - but certain things about her look became common, then constant. Her nails were always painted, though this time round she disliked makeup. Where her previous selves had a thing for black, she gravitated towards bright colours, uncaring if they clashed so long as they were bold and glorious. She found a silver brooch in a marketplace, twisting silver lines that seemed to vanish into themselves only to rise out again, and wore it everywhere. She let her hair stay blonde, although its style changed on a whim.  
  
The woman she saw when she looked in the mirror was becoming less of a disguise, and more of a person.

*

They took it in turns to choose where to go. It didn’t exactly prevent arguments, but it did make resolving them easier.

Their last stop had been a frankly exhausting mess, trying to stop an AI system gone wrong from killing its citizens (she’d left the programmers a copy of Asimov’s short stories, with annotations). All she wanted to do was relax, so she’d dragged a complaining Doctor to the beaches of Tuorta. The climate was carefully controlled, and the sand was cleaned and kept out of annoying places by an army of nanobots, and waiters on hoverbikes would bring you any food or drink you wanted as you lounged in the sun. It was perfect, and even the Doctor stopped complaining after a few hours (and a few good books shoved under her nose).

She lay with her eyes closed, the sun a warm weight grounding her to the earth, settling into her skin. The long afternoon dwindled away in comfortable silence, broken only by the sound of the Doctor turning pages.

‘I love this,’ the Doctor said, after a few hours.

She cracked one eye open and smirked. ‘I told you you’d enjoy a day at the beach.’

‘No, not this. This,’ she said, gesturing between the two of them. ‘I’m glad you’re here, I felt like...’ She paused for a moment, closed her book, giving off the impression that she was about to say something important. ‘I’m old. I’ve seen so much, more than one person should ever have to, really. When I regenerated, I felt like… I didn’t want to go on, do it all again, same old mistakes, same old story. This new me, I was just running around, doing what I was supposed to do, and then you turned up. And everything feels… different. New. Every planet, the whole universe - it feels different, because I’m seeing it with you. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and found herself smiling, softly. She knew she didn’t need to say anything more. They understood each other. Always had.

*

‘Nova,’ the Doctor said one day.

They were half-buried inside a computer terminal, trying to rewire the circuitry so that they could use the colony’s broadcasting equipment to make a defensive forcefield. ‘What are you on about? And pass me your sonic.’

‘You can make your own, we’ve got all the equipment in the TARDIS,’ she complained, but handed it over. Ever since she’d been killed by her own laser screwdriver, she hadn’t felt much like making another variation. ‘Nova. For you. It means new.’’

‘I know that, you idiot. Have you got those circuits disconnected yet?’ They weren’t, she could see that from where she was lying. The Doctor rolled her eyes and got back to it.

Nova. It didn’t just mean new, she recalled: it was also something to do with how humans classified stellar events. They had such an inelegant system that it took her a few moments to remember. Nova: the sudden increase in a star’s brightness, so called because to primitive humans it had looked like a new star appearing in the sky. Caused by the interaction between two binary stars, orbiting closely, pulling matter from one to the other.

She _liked_ it.

‘It’ll do for now, I suppose,’ said Nova.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Someone attempts to abduct Missy while she’s travelling alone. She doesn’t come to any harm and as you might imagine, this does not end well for the perpetrator. The fic also involves mentions of torture and references to off-screen loss of life (including children). There is no explicit or graphic detail for any of it.
> 
> *
> 
> Thank you all for reading! I hope you enjoyed <3


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